Me, Myself, and My iPad
We gotta talk about realistic digital drawings. Why? Because suddenly they’re everywhere. And by everywhere, I mean all over my Instagram feed…where else even is there?
Now, I’ve never been a huge fan of hyper photo realism, I’ll admit it. I’ve always been in awe of someone’s patience and ability to perfectly replicate an image. But my awe and my non-fandom are not mutually exclusive. I’ve never understood someone’s desire to recreate a photo to such a degree they’ve basically just created another version of the photo albeit slightly blurrier. I should note that this opinion only applies to digital recreations. The Gerhard Richters and CJ Henrys of the world amaze me (I sense another post coming soon on that). What I’m talking about is a digital recreation of an image that was most likely taken with a digital camera to create what is, at the end of the day, a duplicate. I’m sure there’s some meta art installation that belongs at Art Basel about humans evolving to such a point that the digital tools we have created have turned us into human printers, but I’m not interested. Well maybe I am, but in the meantime I’ll go to CVS and pay the photo booth to spit me out a shiny 5x7 any day, plus I can get a Butterfinger while I wait.
What I really want to talk about is what we’re gonna do with our work now that we have the ability to create images quicker, cleaner and basically as realistic as we want them to be.
We have officially hit the point in painting where “anyone can do it.” With apps like Procreate, you can drop in a photo, choose spot colors, grab a brush from one of its dozen brush and texture options, paint on top of the picture, and blend away.
New tools have made it as easy for anyone to be a realistic painter as Squarespace made it for all of us to be web designers. So is the iPad a new tool for our originality or are we running the risk of letting our digital tools determine the outcome of our final work? As artists, we want to be masters of our medium, not let them define us.
With more access to programs like Procreate (it’s 10 dollars, I mean come on, that is amazing!), it’s more important than ever to have a point of view on the work we’re creating. We need to bring something new to the table and create work that is unique to ourselves — images that go beyond the reference pictures, work that only we could create. I’m trying everyday to get better at that. Easier said than done.
